Lunar Descent (18 page)

He examined the screen for a moment, then swiveled around in his chair to face McGraw. “Okay,” he said, “there's the tug we just launched and there's the
Collins
. Looks like a routine cargo-recovery mission to me. You were saying something about piracy?”

Tina McGraw's narrow eyes bored into the projection on the wall-screen. “Why can't you get more than an estimation of their trajectories over the farside?” she asked. “And why did you ignore my request for a Mercator projection?”

“We don't have radar installations on the other side of the terminator capable of reporting a cohesive picture,” Lester replied casually. He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers together; he had to admit he was beginning to enjoy vexing the security officer. “That's because navigational radar dishes over there would interfere with the VLF radiotelescope at Hawking Station. They've got very sensitive instruments working full time at Krasovsky Crater, and any radar we'd put on farside would foul their reception.”

McGraw frowned. “I see,” she said, in a tone which suggested that she really didn't understand.

“You can't get a Mercator projection without those navigational radar dishes,” Lester continued, “because you need farside radar to give you an accurate fix on something's trajectory in order to establish its flightpath. All we can do is display its position over the nearside and give a best-guess computer estimate of where it is when it crosses the terminator to the farside. It's a necessary compromise.”

McGraw appeared less than satisfied with Riddell's explanation. Yet she said nothing and stolidly watched the screen. Lester watched as her narrow eyes squinted to slits, her mouth pursed in a pugnacious scowl. There was much about McGraw which reminded Lester of pushy small-town cops he had met in the past, the type who couldn't get enough of throwing their weight around. “It'll do,” she said simply. “We'll just watch and see. Give me …”

She glanced at Riddell and deferentially rephrased her request. “Can you
please
ask your TELMU to see if he can locate an orbital object with a radio beacon transmitting at 103.5 kilohertz? If he finds it …”

She stopped; an enigmatic Cheshire-cat smile grew on her face. “
When
he finds it,” she corrected herself, “ask him to match that object with the appropriate image on the screen.”

What in the bloody hell was going on here? Yet instead of asking, Riddell turned around in his chair until he found the young, blond-haired man sitting at the TELMU station. He started to call to him, then paused. If he wanted to establish himself as being the head man, it would help if he started calling his people by their given names. Simply yelling “Hey, you!” wasn't a good way to gain anyone's confidence. Funny how those things were coming back to him.
Maybe I did want this job back after all
, he mused as he tapped into the logbook again.

He found the name of the telemetry officer now on watch:
Schneider, Jeremy
. “Schneider,” he said, and the TELMU's head cocked slightly as he heard the general manager's voice in his headset. “See if you can locate an orbital object which is transmitting at 103.5 kilohertz. When you get it, pass it over to TRAFCO … ah, Shimoda … for him to plot on the screen. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Schneider bent over his console, but his fingers hesitated for a few moments before they went to work. Lester noticed the meticulous way in which Schneider entered the instructions; he obviously was still learning the commands.
Must be another new guy
, Lester thought distractedly.

“There,” McGraw said suddenly. “You see?”

Riddell glanced back at the screen. Something odd had happened. A second window had opened on the screen; the numbers showed that the frequency-search had discovered just such an object. The
Collins'
AOMV was now depicted in a lapsed-time sequence just before it had crossed the eastern terminator. As Shimoda eliminated the unnecessary second window—now the blue blip of light had a second alphanumeric code scrolled beneath it as it circled the farside of the Moon—Lester glanced again at McGraw and noticed that she had a distinctly smug look on her face.

McGraw looked down at him. “That's a transmitter which was covertly placed in a Spam-can before it was loaded on the
Sally Ride
, Mr. Riddell,” she explained, reading the expression on his face. Lester couldn't help but notice that she had reverted to formality in addressing him. “It was supposed to be on a Spam-can manifested for an OTV to Olympus Station. I wonder how it ended up on the
Collins
instead?”

Lester stared back at her, then looked back at the screen. He had been on the
Ride
, too, when he had taken it up to Phoenix Station. McGraw had already been at Phoenix when he had arrived, come to think of it. Too many things were getting weird too fast. “How did … Why was a transmitter put aboard the …?”

“I'll explain the details later,” McGraw said impatiently. She leaned over the back of a vacant chair and watched the big screen intently. “The important fact right now is that the Spam-can has a homing transmitter aboard which allows us to track it.”

Lester rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger as he watched the tracks of the two spacecraft intercept over the lunar farside. He was getting sick and tired of McGraw's attitude. She had hidden her identity from him for the three days that they were aboard the
Collins
, then presented herself as the new security chief as if she were the head of a Central American secret police force, following which she attempted to run his command center as if he were a puppet leader. Now she was operating on a hidden agenda which suggested that Skycorp and NASA had plotted something in advance, a weird sting operation in which he was expected to obediently play a passive role. Something strange was happening here, and he didn't like what he had seen of it so far.

“Okay, McGraw,” he said softly, “what's going on?”

McGraw's catty smile broadened a little. “Just wait and see,” she replied. “Somebody's in for a big surprise.”

Classified Information (Interview.4)

Angelo deCastro: assistant director, Corporate Security Division, Skycorp (Huntsville headquarters):

(
NOTE: This interview was conducted in the presence of NASA Space Operations Enforcement Division public affairs officer Leslie Hieronymous, who interjected at points on behalf of the space agency.
)

deCastro:
We knew … um, that some sort of smuggling activity was taking place at our Cape Canaveral operation. (
spreads his hands
) Really, Mr. Steele, the company has always had a problem with contraband making its way into space, such as the time in '17 when something like four hundred cases of beer managed to get smuggled up to Olympus Station in an OTV, so it's never been anything new to us. We've always tried to keep it under control, but it's difficult to keep an eye on every single payload canister which gets shipped up there. In this particular case, though, we were able to nip it in the bud mainly because we received information from a reliable source at the Cape that … um, certain restricted items were being put into the cans when they were being loaded in the shuttles at the company's Shuttle Processing Center … Pardon me?

Hieronymous:
I'm sorry, that information is classified.

deCastro:
Ah … Yes, right. I can't confirm or deny if there was an informer involved. All I can tell you is that we received word that the items were being put aboard so-called Spam-cans which were scheduled for launch in company-owned shuttles, and that one of the company's supervisors had been bribed by the same persons to overlook those payload canisters when it came time for him to inspect the shuttle's cargo bay. This supervisor, along with the other … ah, parties involved, were eventually dismissed from our employment and turned over to NASA's Space Operations Enforcement Division for arrest and subsequent prosecution under federal law. On that particular point, I'm … um, not at liberty to discuss the matter in further detail.

Hieronymous:
The case against the alleged suspects is still in litigation.

deCastro:
Right. Anyway, once this was discovered, the Corporate Security Division worked with NASA to find out the final destination of the contraband items, and that's when we made a second interesting … um, discovery. Apparently the restricted items were originally intended to be sent to Olympus Station. That is, that was the original … ah, intent of the parties involved, and that this had been going along for quite some time. But in their last two attempts to illicitly ferry the contraband to Olympus, the designated Spam-cans had not made their way to the space station, although they had been launched from Cape Canaveral. Instead they went (
waves his hand
) somewhere else entirely.

This led us to believe that, in some way, we were dealing with two—not one, but
two
—entirely independent smuggling operations, with the second one parasitically feeding off the labors of the first group. (
smiles
) That was when it became quite interesting … um, from a law enforcement standpoint. We had no direct clues to tell us where the hijacked Spam-cans had been sent, because whoever from the second group had arranged the diversion at the SPC had been able to doctor the cargo manifests so that the canisters appeared to have been shipped to Olympus, although the persons in the first group told us, once we interrogated them, that those two Spam-cans never got to Olympus at all. Understand? I mean, are you following me so far?

That led us to several alternative scenarios. (
holds up his forefinger
) One, the contraband cargo was being sent back to Earth, by nearly the same means, for resale. We ruled that out almost immediately, since most of the contraband … booze, for instance … had little or no resale value back on Earth. Didn't make sense. (
holds up a second finger
) Two, the contraband was making its way to our installation at Arsia Station on Mars, or (
holds up a third finger
) three, it was going to Descartes Station on the Moon. Given the closer … um, proximity of the Moon base as opposed to the Mars base, we decided to focus our attention on Descartes Station.

This presented us with a difficult situation, given the fact that Descartes Station had recently been through a shakeout of its personnel and that we had a new General Manager coming aboard at the base at the same time that we were pursuing our investigation. Fortunately, NASA was also placing a field officer up there at the same time to act as the base's new security chief … um, that's right, Ms. McGraw … and she was willing to act as the point man in our investigation.…

Hieronymous:
Point woman …

deCastro:
Excuse me, point woman … um, in our investigation. So when she was transferred to her new assignment, she went in a covert low-profile role, appearing to be just another new lunar worker on her way to the Moon, in hopes of gathering additional information. But, mainly, she was to observe the covert sting operation we had put in place. In this operation, which we code-named Operation Blue Moon, we placed …

Hieronymous:
Sorry, sir, this operation is still classified information.

deCastro:
Um … right. It's still classified information.

Hieronymous:
Sorry.

deCastro:
Sorry. Well, um … (
coughs
) do you have any more questions?

9. Booby Trap

Damn, it's dark out here
, Annie said.
Gimme some more light, Joe, willya
?

Mighty Joe reached to his left and flipped a switch which turned on another bank of the exterior hull searchlights. Through the canopy windows he could see the stark white glare reflecting off the gold Mylar foil wrapped around the AOMV's hull. Two spots of light shined on the opaque cockpit of Noonan's work capsule, hovering alongside the
Collins
. “See better now?” he asked politely.

Fine, thanks
, Noonan replied over the comlink. He couldn't see her through the windows of the tiny, bottle-shaped RWS, but he could watch the long, triple-jointed arms of its remote manipulators imitating her hand movements. She had already transferred most of the Spam-cans to the tug; they were lashed to the strongbacks on the
Dreamer
's lower fuselage, giving the tug the vague appearance of a worker bee carrying pollen sacs to the hive. The empty cargo cradles yawned open behind the
Collins'
aerobrake heat shield. Once the AOMV was reunited with its lander, the moonship would be heading back to Earth orbit; although it would never land on the planet itself, it would make an aerobraking maneuver in the upper atmosphere before rendezvousing with its LEO hangar near Phoenix Station.

Annie had unlocked the final Spam-can—the one in particular which had been diverted from delivery to Olympus Station—and had the massive canister gripped by the arms' pincers.
Okay, we got it
, Noonan said.
Ready to bring it aboard
?

“Affirmatory on that.” Joe double-checked the status lights for the cargo bay, making sure that the hatch was still open, and then glanced at the event timer. Rusty silently pointed at the CRT screen between them, where a three-dimensional image of their position over the lunar farside was displayed. They were completing their third orbit now; things were getting a little tight. “We need to hurry it up, sweetheart,” he added. “Big Russ here tells me we're T-minus-eleven to coming over the terminator again, and I'd rather not …”

Okay, okay, I heard you already
. The RCRs on the sides of her work capsule flared briefly, pinpricks of matchlight against the dark bulk of the Moon in the background, and the little one-person vehicle glided sideways toward the stern of the tug, shoving the Spam-can along in front of it.
Tell me again at T-minus-five if we're still cutting it close, but otherwise shut up and lemme work
.